


Like Father, Like Son.

by merisunshine36



Category: Star Trek (2009)
Genre: Multi
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-03-28
Updated: 2010-03-28
Packaged: 2017-10-08 09:31:40
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,308
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/75276
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/merisunshine36/pseuds/merisunshine36
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Chris, Winona, and George were the perfect story of young love. And then Winona got pregnant.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like Father, Like Son.

**Author's Note:**

> There is a crazy hot mess of canon-picking going on here. Since Sam was erased from the movie and instead turned into the neighbor kid named "Johnny", I have conveniently wiped him from this narrative as well. I've also co-opted various deleted scenes and the novel (i.e. Frank is Jim's uncle) for my own nefarious purposes.
> 
> Disclaimer: Star Trek and the characters herein are the property of Paramount, JJ Abrams, CBS and other people who are decidedly not me. I am making no money from this.

Chris and Winona and George were like pieces of a puzzle. They shifted in order and design, but were always together, locked up tight. George was loyal and Winona reckless, and Chris was...well, Chris was the method to their madness, made of equal parts hard data and irrefutable logic. So it only hurt a little when they took off without him, leaving him behind to finish out his time at the Academy. So far they'd been lucky, having received a short posting on the same ship, and close to Earth. They commed Chris as often as they could, excited to watch him shudder and break apart at their command.

_I wanna see you touch yourself, cadet_, Winona would say.

Then George would shake his head and interject with,_No, no hands this time. Our boy is flexible, let's give him a chance to show us what he can do._

Chris would duck his head, trying to hide the red flush of anticipation creeping up his face. And then he'd stretch out on his back, take a few deep breaths, and focus on the clench in his abs as he brought his knees up, up, and over his head. The smell of his own arousal was dizzying as he took the warm weight of his own cock into his mouth, but not nearly as much as the sound of George's delighted whooping over the comm line, or the telltale moans that followed.

* * *

  
After what seemed like ages of waiting, George and Winona were back in San Francisco on shore leave. There were rumors flying about that George might be promoted the position of first officer on the _Kelvin_. They couldn't have asked for better news, as this meant that it was much more likely that George could pull some strings and get Winona and Chris assigned there, too. For a time, everything was perfect.

Until the day things fell apart.

Somehow, their sperm had outwitted the best contraceptives medical science had to offer, because Winona was pregnant. Despite the fact that two-thirds of their triad were on active duty, George and Winona were strangely ecstatic. Then again, Chris had stopped expecting them to make sense a long time ago. They strutted around the city telling anyone who would listen about their drug-defying superzygote. Their faces would light up so damn bright that they didn't even notice the deepening shadows beneath Chris' eyes.

He started seeing babies everywhere—babies floating in hoverprams with their parents as he walked back to his quarters, or being breastfed by their mothers during a sunny day out on the quadrangle. He even started losing sleep to nightmares wherein he was on a starship in a moment of crisis, and the entire bridge crew would turn into squalling infants.

The sex was different, too. In the normal course of things, Chris was a legs man. He loved watching the muscles in Winona's thighs bunch and shift as he left tiny bite marks in her soft skin. But now he couldn't keep his hands off her breasts, imagining them round and heavy with milk as they tried to outpace the growth of her stomach. George took this new development in stride, but Winona knew something was up.

“You stop worrying,” she hissed in his ear one night as she struggled to extract herself from beneath George's heavy form. Unlike him, she had never been much of a cuddler. We'll work something out, you'll see.”

She dozed off to the steady sound of George's contended snoring, leaving Chris alone with his fears. He had plotted out a hundred different scenarios about how this might work, but the most logical conclusion was always that he should defer his posting for a few years until Winona or George rotated back to Earth. After all, Chris was only an ensign; Winona and George had much more to lose. But that didn't make things any easier.

He had never signed up to be a father. He had finals in three weeks. He hadn't even completed his training cruise yet. He was only twenty-one. He couldn't do this. He was scared as hell.

So it wasn't really him speaking when he asked Winona if she might be willing to take a paternity test. It wasn't his voice that kept making those meaningless sounds, tripping and falling, _Maybe it's best if we cool things off for a while, I mean, there's no guarantee that we'll all even be assigned to the _Kelvin_ and I think I need to take some time to think and of course I'll take responsibility if it's mine but otherwise I think I should just..._

He barely had time to register the shattered look in George's eyes before Winona's fist came out of nowhere. She knocked him flat on his face and then held his head down in the grass, spitting curses and threats in his ears. Chris gagged as tiny particles of dirt were sucked into his lungs and throat; he was sure he felt one or two ants crawl up his nose.

When George pried away Winona's fingers, Chris felt a flash of regret. The pain was good. He deserved it. He was a coward.

Two weeks later, they'd taken off on the _Kelvin_ without another word to him. Chris had sent them endless messages begging them to reconsider. Space was no place for a pregnant woman, much less a baby. But they didn't respond, and gradually his guilt turned into hot and bitter indignation. They had never cared about anything other than satisfying their foolish need for glory and adventure, anyway. It had always been Chris' job to remind them that they were fragile, and made of earth just like everyone else.

  


* * *

  
When the _Kelvin_ survivors returned to Earth, Chris had every intention of going out to meet Winona and the baby (he still couldn't bring himself to call it his) at the docking station. She and little James Tiberius were famous already, because the details of his birth had been splashed across the homepage of what seemed like every media outlet in the Federation.

No one came to tell him that George was dead. The forms for a domestic partnership agreement were still saved to a file on his PADD, but they had wanted to wait until after Chris' graduation. A few weeks after the _Kelvin_'s departure, Chris received an awkward comm from George. After discussing it with Winona, they were no longer so sure it was the right thing for the three of them. So he heard about disaster while going through his messages one morning, eating a bowl of cereal that was supposed to be healthy but mostly tasted like dirt.

Now Chris slowly puts on his dress uniform, hands shaking like he was ninety-five. He spent an hour loading down his hair with product to make the wispy curls lay flat. His nails are clean, and he'd gotten rid of the scruff that had been growing since he first received the news and suddenly lost the energy to feed or bathe himself, forget about grooming. He sat on the bed to pull his boots on, and found that he couldn't move. He just sat there, heart pounding in his ears. The sun continued on its journey across the sky without him. Eventually, Chris grew tired and collapsed sideways onto the bed, his body curled tight around the pillow.

He wondered what Winona would say if he showed up at her door right now. She was probably back in Riverside with that brother of hers, a burly man fifteen years her senior named Frank. She wouldn't be the glowing perfect image of motherhood in the holos but instead her hair would be piled up in a messy bun, a few tendrils escaping to frame a face made softer from the weight she would've gained during pregnancy. She'd be standing with her hip canted to one side to support the tiny person she carried hidden away in a mess of blankets. Maybe she was wearing one of those oversized t-shirts she was fond of sleeping in, her breasts so large and full that he would be able to make out the shape of her nipples beneath the worn fabric. Chris pressed the heel of his palm down on his groin, ashamed to find himself growing hard.

_I'm sorry_, Chris imagined himself saying. Or maybe, _tell me how I can help_. One particularly romantic fantasy involved him walking six dusty kilometers from the shuttle station to the house, upon which Winona would gather him in her motherly arms and they could pour out their sweat-stained grief onto each others shoulders. The scene played out before his eyes for a while, until it faded into blackness and fitful sleep.

  


* * *

  
Chris threw himself into his work after that, cutting through the hierarchy and becoming the youngest captain on record in a few short years. In the absence of his family, he took an intense interest in the lives of his crew, spending hours looking over their files in order to memorize their skills and weaknesses. Chris moved them about like chess pieces, transferring some and keeping others, until he had a ship that ran so tightly he began to fear the Admiralty would break them up to ensure a more equitable distribution of the magic Chris had worked. What eventually happened was even worse. The brass took his ship and decided he would be better used in a teaching position at the Academy, with a few recruitment runs thrown in for spice and variety.

He always kept an eye on Jim, making frequent use of his hacking skills to track him through the public school system. He watched as his grades went from stellar to average and finally terminated at awful, with him dropping out at sixteen and getting his equivalency instead. Chris felt an odd surge of pride in him that day, and became incredibly maudlin when he realized that he had no one to tell. No one knew about Jim, not even Phil Boyce or Number One, who between them knew almost everything there was to know about Chris. He went on an incredible bender that night, which culminated in his buying a motorcycle as a congratulatory gift of sorts and shipping it to Winona's place along with a long note saying how sorry he was. He had never been so relieved in his life to see confirmation that although the bike was accepted, the recipient had chosen not to read the accompanying message.

Jim fell off the radar after that, which should have been impossible to do these days. But then again, it should have been impossible to save 800 lives in twelve minutes.

* * *

Chris had little hope that he'd find any new information about Jim, instead contenting himself with tracking Winona's movement through the ranks. So he nearly pissed himself when he recognized the battered and bloodied face of the young man spread out across a table in the dingy shipyard bar. It was a little hard for Chris to breathe now that he had Jim sitting right in front of him. Under the dim haze of the bluish lighting, it was hard not to look for signs of himself in the angle of Jim's jaw or the shape of his mouth.

There was a message from Winona blinking on his comm the next morning. _I can't give him what he needs, not anymore. Here's your second chance. Don't fuck it up._

Getting Jim's criminal record expunged was no easy task, requiring him to cash in on most of the favors he had coming to him over the years. From what Chris could tell, Winona had never told Jim anything about the circumstances surrounding his conception. He didn't know the first thing about being a father, and so fell back on what he knew about being a captain, fast-tracking Jim into second year command courses and securing him a position as the assistant instructor for advanced hand to hand. Chris watched him from afar as he built a new family made of a curmudgeonly doctor and a laughing Orion girl, and he wanted to choke him to death when he saw Jim betray her.

Like father, like son.

* * *  


  
The last thing he ever expected was to see was Jim's face on the bridge of the _Enterprise_.

Only by virtue of the fact that years of command had gifted Chris with the ability to parse multiple streams of data at once was he able to make sense of Jim's frantic assertions about Romulans attacking and lightning storms in space. Because as he looked at the young man in front of him, he didn't see James Tiberius Kirk at all. He saw the firm set of George's jaw, the reckless light in Winona's eyes, and heard his own voice laying out hard data and irrefutable logic.

The chances of both he and Jim surviving this were practically nonexistent. What he _should_ have done was sedate the kid and dump him on an escape pod headed for the nearest starbase. He would be safe. It was the option that made the most sense.

Instead, he called for Jim to follow him off the bridge, and prayed that he wasn't sending him to an early grave. Promoting a grounded cadet to XO was the stupidest thing he'd ever done, made worse by the fact that it was his son. If he asked Spock, he'd probably say there was a 99.9999% chance of this ending badly. He couldn't expect anyone to back him up on this, and if it failed, Chris could expect to be pushing paper for the rest of his career—and that only if he was lucky.

But Jim had said once that he didn't believe in no-win scenarios. Neither did Chris.


End file.
